Novelist Anne Tyler was once described as a writer who likes to break America's heart."Oh, dear! Well, don't you think life kind of breaks your heart?" she said.Stories about life breaking your heart, and how love can sometimes mend it, have made Tyler a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and a best-selling author for six decades.In 1977, she told The New York Times, "It does matter to me that I be considered a serious writer.
….A serious book is one that removes me to another life as I am reading it.
… It has to be an extremely believable lie.""I don't remember saying that, but I believe every word of it still!" she laughed."The fact that it's a lie is a very important part of what makes it not real life, don't worry! And the fact that it's a believable lie makes you say, I am actually being another person right now."The people who live in Tyler's two dozen books have touched countless readers: "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," "Breathing Lessons," "A Spool of Blue Thread," and "The Accidental Tourist," which became a critically-acclaimed film with William Hurt as a travel writer who hates to travel, and Geena Davis, who won an Oscar for playing the woman who shows him that love is possible for those willing to take a chance.Tyler said, "What makes me keep going as a writer is a more selfish motive, which is, I'm just always wanting to know what it's like to be somebody else.
… I feel almost deprived that I have just this one life; I have to be greedy and reach out and see, Well, that guy I just passed in the street, he said that strang thing, what is it like to be him? It's just self-indulgence to sit and write all day and pretend I'm somebody else." "I love listening to people" Tyler grew up in a quiet Quaker community in North Carolina.She would tell herself stories to fall asleep at night: "I would fold my knees up and that would be my desk, and I would be a doctor seeing patients, and I would whisper these conversations.
And it always ...